Slow learners at school.

  • Great Britain. Department of Education and Science.
Date:
1964
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Slow learners at school. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/108 (page 12)
    in forming clear concepts. They find it difficult to formulate the similarities and differences between objects and between situations, and to generalise from these experiences. Normal children early acquire the power to distinguish for example a ball from an orange. They learn by direct experience, by observing and handling these objects, to identify sufficient characteristics of both in order to recognise and name them. Similarly an orange is distinguished from an apple, two from three and long from short. They begin to understand words, to have an idea of their meaning. The development of language involves children in this activity to an increasing degree until they are capable of forming abstract concepts such as goodness, equality and freedom. Normal children, as Terman and Piaget have shown, develop this power from the age of eleven years onwards. Dull children developing their concepts and language in a much slower and more concrete way may never acquire many abstract ideas at all. They tend to be tied to the particular experience or familiar example. The inability of dull children to generalise from experience is evident in fields other than language development. Normal children, after some preliminary experience of pairs of objects, quickly realise that two of them put with two others make four, and from this and similar experiences derive an understanding of the concept of 2+ 2 =4. Once this has been understood it is a simple matter for them to realise that, conversely, if they have four and give two away, they will have two left; in fact that 4 — 2 =2. This concept they are able to utilise not only with the number four but with other numbers, and will later deduce the generalisation that a+ b=c implies a = c — b. They have, in fact, learned to use their experience in other situations, or to reason. Dull children will always find the process difficult; the dullest may have to learn everything new from the beginning, while others will need far more experience on which to base their generalisations than do more gifted children. This is to say no more than that they learn slowly, — and learn more readily by doing than by reasoning, by dealing with things rather than with ideas. But it would be wholly mistaken to assume that dull children cannot think and that they learn only by the thoughtless execution of manual tasks. Rather is the power to think to be developed by learning in practical situations. Every task needs to be designed to develop the intellect. The child is helped to analyse the situation and derive from it the experience which enables him to undertake a comparable task more con- fidently. For dull children learning that evokes no thought and develops no insight is of limited value; they need to learn intelli- gently, not by rote.